These 45 countries have the largest gold reserves

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Considered a ‘safe haven’ during crises, the yellow metal is being stockpiled by central banks around the world. Central banks added 650 tons to their reserves in 2019, the second highest shift in 50 years, after 656 tons were added in 2018. Before the 2008 financial crisis, central banks were net sellers of gold worldwide for decades. Also, there has been a large effort by central banks to repatriate their gold as well, mostly from storage in New York Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, which are the two largest keepers of gold in the world. After this brief… Continue reading

Top 10 most expensive countries to buy a property

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The housing market is subject to various housing and social state policies that affect people’s decisions about buying a house. Moreover, the market is also closely related to the banking sector and its lending activity, considering that most of the investments in immovable properties are made through loans, thus changes to the interest rate can have an impact on the entire construction sector. On the other side, changes to the price of immovable properties have a key role in the decisions taken by central banks all over the world. So, these two sectors depend on each other and influence each… Continue reading

Top 100 best world’s companies to work for

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The performance of a company is linked to satisfaction of its work force. A company that does not measure and improve employee satisfaction may face increasing turnover, declining productivity and limited ability to attract and retain qualified replacements. Instead a company that provides better working conditions for its employees has better performance, because a quality work place is essential to keep your employees on task and working efficiently. Unfortunately, many companies do an inadequate job of measuring and improving the quality of the workplace and this implies negative performance for a company. In this work, we are not going to… Continue reading

Top 100 most admired companies in the world

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Corporate reputation is the general opinion that people have about a corporation or enterprise. It is very important to have a good reputation, because if the company has a positive reputation, it can attract better people, it is perceived as providing more value, its customers are more loyal, it has higher P/E multiples and market values and lower costs of capital. Most companies, however, do an inadequate job of managing their reputations in general and the risks to their reputations in particular. They tend to focus their energies on handling the threats to their reputations that have already surfaced. In… Continue reading

The Black Litterman model: how to use it

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The Black Litterman model was developed in 1990 at Goldman Sachs by Fischer Black and Robert Litterman and published in 1992. It is a sophisticated portfolio construction method that overcomes the problem of unintuitive, highly-concentrated portfolios, input-sensitivity, and estimation error maximization, in applying modern portfolio theory in practice. The model uses a Bayesian approach to combine the subjective views of an investor regarding the expected returns of one or more assets with the market equilibrium vector of expected returns to form a new, mixed estimate of expected returns. The resulting new vector of returns leads to intuitive portfolios with sensible… Continue reading

The modern portfolio theory: how to use it

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Modern portfolio theory (MPT) or mean-variance model was developed by Harry Markowitz and published in 1952 by the Journal of Finance. It is an investing model that enables risk-averse investors to maximize returns for a given amount of risk or minimize the risk for a given amount of returns. For developing the MPT he was later awarded a Nobel prize. The risk of every investing portfolio returns has two components: systematic risk and unsystematic risk. The first is the market risks that cannot be diversified away. The second the specific risk of a stock and can be diversified away by… Continue reading

The best and worst countries to live in 2020

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The quality of life in 2020 has dropped in all the countries in the world. This is going to be a very tough year for the world, so there are necessary concerted and decisive response to the global and local problems. This work will not be focused on the problems that all the countries in the world are facing now and not even on the necessary solutions, but will be focused on the ranking of the countries by quality of life. Many people think that quality of life is the same of GDP per capita, but this is not true…. Continue reading

The world’s most valuable brands 2020

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A brand is an intangible asset of a business, and helps in differentiating between a company’s book value and market value. Calculating the value of a brand is not simple, because due to its intangible nature, the power of a brand can be difficult to translate to a balance sheet. Knowing the brand value is fundamental for every company to know its brand value and there are a number of methods to measure the brand value of a company, but in this work, we are not going to focus on how to measure the brand value, but we are going… Continue reading

Top 35 Canadian insurance companies by assets

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The Canadian insurance market in general has changed significantly over the last two years, with insurers taking a far more disciplined approach to underwriting beyond merely looking at price adequacy. Across the board, insurers are reducing their limits where appropriate, exiting certain industry segments, and reducing coverage. In this work, we are going to present the rank of the 35 largest insurance companies in Canada by total assets, which still remains today, one of the most widely used indicators for comparing banks with each other. Let’s now see the 35 largest insurance companies in the Canada by assets. In the… Continue reading

Ranking of stock exchanges in the world 2020

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In the last years, many stock exchanges have reached impressive dimensions compared to the past, while others have become smaller. There are several factors that have led to these results, but they will not be analysed in this work, which will be focused on the realization of the ranking of the largest stock exchanges in the world. In this post, we are going to rank the stock exchanges by market capitalization and number of listed companies. The capitalization of a stock exchanges is given by the sum of the market cap of all listed companies. The market capitalization, in turn,… Continue reading